Let noun1 verb noun2

Stefan Hartmann

Data

  • ENCOW16BX (Schäfer & Bildhauer (2012))

  • webcorpus containing 9 billion tokens

  • downloaded data queried via CWB

Query

[lemma=“let”] [pos=“N.|PP.”][pos=“V.*”][pos=“DT”]?[pos=“N.*”]

Results

First observations

  • recurrent quotes, e.g. Let them eat cake

  • discourse-organizing and text-organizing semi-formulaic patterns, e.g. Let me explain, let us examine

  • proverbs, e.g. let bygones be bygones

Collostructional analysis

  • Multiple covarying collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries (2005))

  • two variants:

    • (pro)noun1 - verb - noun2

    • verb - noun2

Results: noun1 - verb - noun2

Results: verb - noun2

References

Schäfer, Roland & Felix Bildhauer. 2012. Building large corpora from the web using a new efficient tool chain. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Terry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk & Stelios Piperidis (eds.), 486493.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th Gries. 2005. Covarying collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(1). 143.